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Monthly Archives: August 2015

It’s been an extremely hot summer, which has led to a bumper crop of tomatoes. The harvest is so big that I’ve been bringing them to work to give to colleagues. I work in a very international office, and recently the discussion turned to how to say “tomato” in everyone’s native language. The results were interesting, and inspired this map (mouse over each country for more details):

The tomato plant is native to South America, but was first domesticated by the Aztecs in present-day Mexico. Their word for the fruit was tomatl*, which means something like “the swelling fruit”. The Spanish brought it to the New World in the 16th century, calling it a tomate.

Many languages still use a derivative of the Spanish word tomate, but another name arose in Italy. The Italian word for tomato is pomodoro, which came from pomo d’oro, or golden apple. Somehow** that name spread to Poland, where they say pomidor, and from there to Russian, Ukrainian, and several other languages.

A different name arose in some German dialects: Paradiesapfel, or “apple of paradise”, which for anyone who has eaten a ripe one right from the vine is an apt description. Although modern Germans way tomate, Austrians call it a paradieser, and variants of this were adapted into Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Serbian and others.

In Arabic, it seems there are two common ways to say “tomato” (At least that’s what my friends tell me. I’d be happy for feedback from any Arabic linguists out there.) There’s tamatim (طماطم), which is used in North Africa. That, of course, comes from tomate. But in the Near East (Syria, Jordan, Lebanon), the common term is banadora (بندورة), from the pomo d’oro family.

It gets really interesting in Hebrew, which has a word for tomato unlike any other language. The word is agvania (עגבניה). It was coined only in 1886 and has as its root the Hebrew word for “to love, desire”. This name was chosen because of the archaic English term “love apple”, an homage to the apparent aphrodisiac properties of the tomato. More on the story of the Hebrew word here.

So there you have it. Pretty interesting for a fruit (vegetable?) only introduced to much of the world a few hundred years ago. Sources for map include Google Translate and Cultivated Vegetables of the World: A Multilingual Onomasticon, an actual book that actually exists. I made the map in CartoDB using the Watercolor base map from Stamen Design. If you want to see more etymology maps, there’s a subreddit dedicated to the topic.

And if all that hasn’t made you hungry from some apples of paradise, this will:

UPDATE: A few readers have correctly pointed out that what I have is a map of nation states, not a map of languages. For the sake of simplicity I am using national borders as a proxy for language regions. I should have specified that I selected the language for each country based on the official language, or if there is more than one, the most commonly spoken language. One negative consequence of that approach is that several states languages did not make it onto the map (e.g. Basque (tomate or tomatea) and Kurdish (temate)).

In honor of Swiss National Day I made a map of all the mountains in Switzerland accessible by public transport (cable car, gondola, cog-wheel railroad, funicular, and chairlift). With the Swiss transportation system you can get to almost all the base stations by train or bus. Having such great access to high places is one of my favorite things about Switzerland.

I made the map in CartoDB using data from a great Wikipedia page. There are about 100 peaks on the list, all with an elevation of at least 800 m, a topographic prominence of at least 30 meters, and a transport station within 120 m of the summit. The highest is the Klein Matterhorn, where you can take a cable car to within 20 m of the 3,883 m summit. The current weather at the time of writing? You guessed it – snow. Here’s the webcam.

For the base map, I used Open Street Maps Switzerland (easily done in CartoDB using XYZ map tiles). While it’s a little more cluttered than I’d like for a base map, the level of detail in the mountain areas is great. You can really zoom in to plan your trip.

One more feature I played with in CartoDB is the customizable infowindows. I added a photo and a link to the Wikipedia page of each peak so it’s more enjoyable to to explore the map and use it as a tool for planning your summit assaults.